Screen Glamour Is Moving Into Real Rooms, And London Is Building Them Fast
Danny Boyle opens the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 2 with Ink, screening in competition in the Sala Grande on the Lido. It’s his first film ever to play Venice, which is a strange sentence to write about a director with an Oscar and a BAFTA on the shelf. Boyle called the invitation “my baptism at the film festival” when La Biennale announced it in July.
For one week the Lido will do what it always does: black tie, lantern light, flashbulbs, the whole visual language cinema invented for itself. Then everyone flies home and the aesthetic goes back in the box until awards season. Except this year it isn’t going back in the box, because London has spent the last eighteen months building permanent rooms for it.
Cabaret Came Back And No One Put A Date On It
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is still running at the Playhouse Theatre with seven Oliviers behind it. The Box Soho occupies the old Raymond Revuebar building, which is roughly the most loaded address in London for this particular trade. Black Cat Cabaret brings its Salon des Artistes to Crazy Coqs at Brasserie Zédel on September 12. Proud Cabaret keeps two rooms going on dinner and burlesque, and Sabrage has put circus cabaret into Lafayette at King’s Cross.
Two more arrive within days of each other. Blue Note, the New York jazz institution, opens its first UK club on St Martin’s Lane on September 23, a 250 capacity room with Robert Glasper on opening night and Erykah Badu and Jamie Cullum following. Then Quaglino’s comes back from its centenary refit with a cabaret stage set close to the tables.
That’s a supply side answer to a demand no one had properly measured. Rooms get built when somebody thinks the audience is real.
A Second September Magazine, Betting On Exactly That Hour
Which brings us to the thing we’ve been shown. NoodleMagazine, the British publisher behind noodle-magazine.co.uk, has a second September release coming: a separate title called Noodle After Dark. It carries Issue No. 01 on the cover because it’s the first issue of its own magazine, though it’s the publisher’s second launch of the month, arriving behind their culture monthly.
The film content is the part that will interest people here. There’s a full Danny Boyle profile built around the Venice opening, Trainspotting hitting thirty this year, and a decision earlier in his career to turn down a franchise job he judged himself wrong for. There’s also original noir fiction, a card sharp story set at Quaglino’s involving a stolen invitation and a marked deck, which is the clearest signal of what the magazine thinks it’s for.
And there’s a pictorial, called The Hour of Gold, working in the classic evening portrait grammar: noir shadow, cabaret sparkle, jazz club languor. The models in it are fictional, which the magazine states on its own pages rather than burying.
What We Haven’t Seen
Plenty. The full contents haven’t been shared, the release date hasn’t been fixed publicly, and the drink, watch and motoring sections were described rather than shown. Whether the writing holds up across a whole issue is a question for the issue.
The interesting bet is the one underneath it. Venice will hand out its Golden Lion on September 12 and the red carpet will fold itself away. Somebody has decided the audience for that hour wants it fifty two weeks a year, in a room they can actually book, with a magazine on the table.
